Discussions on Geography and geospatial technologies

Author: Barb

Something that I’ve wanted to post for a while is Reader’s Digests 50 jokes for 50 states competition. You can be entered in a chance to win $1,500 for a funny but family friendly joke about your state. According to their introductory paragragh, jokes show “the U.S.A. is one big, happy dysfunctional family” It might […]

If you are a fan of Coronation Street, the award winning Manchester soap opera, then you will love Google Street Views new view of The Street. I imagine since it has been running since 1960 it will feel very familiar to many people. I went lookingn to see what other famous fictional street views I […]

Never lose your way on the NYC subway again or have to stop to check out those pesky signs, instead you can use the new “NYC SUBWAY” quilt fabric made by The City Quilter. They also have some awesome ariel shots of “Olde New York“. You can do like Quilty Indulgence did and make a […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) today announced the DARPA Network Challenge to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet. The competition requires participants to discover the exact position of 10 large, red weather balloons that DARPA will place in undisclosed locations across the continental United States. The first person to identify the location […]

The U.K. Daily Mail must have a geographer on staff because they always have interesting geospatial related stories. They recently have an article about a white water rafting company in Colorado that is using a “pigeon express” to deliver memory cards to the their home base. According to the article, Rocky Mountain Adventures found that […]

Treehugger has a story about a a GPS bike navigation device created by Kajimoto Laboratories that uses ear pulling for tactile navigation. From their website, it looks like Kajimoto Laboratories works with many tactile devices and that this one was actually created in 2008.

Whenever anyone creates a crime map for an area, it always seems to raise the same questions about house values, safety, etc. According to the UK Daily Mail, The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) believe a new interactive crime map could seriously hurt home values. The National Policing Improvement Agency provides information on crime […]

According to the Daily Mail, the famous Alton Barnes white horse landmark is being restored with 150 tons of chalk. It was last refreshed 25 years ago. A recent story in the Telegraph states that an older landmark, Osmington White Horse, was damaged by a 1989 attempt to refresh it as part of a television […]

The Foliage Network is a site that uses citizen scientists or foliage watchers to give them up to date reports on autumn leaves throught the U.S. and sends it to newspapers, television stations, and web sites. Highlighting the importance of participatory GIS is the fact that they can’t report on Delaware, Minnesota and Rhode Island […]

The United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agriculture Service in partnership with NASA has a Crop Explorer mapping global food supply by region. It can be searched by region or commodity. One of the things I found most interesting was the visitor’s map which shows where people who visit the site are logging in from […]